


Blank Slate

by Lady_Quill



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fluff, Gen, School
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-24
Updated: 2013-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-09 09:03:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/772430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Quill/pseuds/Lady_Quill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the Tag 2013 Collection.  Just a bit of fluff, takes place during the early 1900s in a one-room schoolhouse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blank Slate

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for the encouraging comments on my last fic! This one should be a bit fluffier, and a more literal take on the prompt "blank slate."

Abby stared at her feet.  She was not going to cry in front of the teacher, she wasn’t, but already the tears were welling up in her eyes.  No, she wasn’t going to make a fool of herself in front of the class, if she could just wait a few more minutes then she could run home and cry in her room and hope the teacher wouldn’t call on her tomorrow.

 

It was a few more minutes and finally Miss Susan dismissed the one-room schoolhouse for the day.  “Abby, I’d like to see you by my desk, please,” she called out before Abby could run off.  They were reviewing math in the afternoons, addition and multiplication and long division.  Susan admitted to herself that she wasn’t the best teacher by far, but it was better than her alternatives.  Some days she could be harsh, taking her dissatisfaction with life out on her students, but she tried to be fair.  Still, this was the second day in a row she’d seen the little girl with pigtails crying by the end of class.

 

“Yes, Miss Susan.”  Abby shuffled down to the front of the room, looking at the wood swirls in the floor, counting the items on her teacher’s desk, anywhere else but up.  She hated feeling dumb.

 

“You seem to have gotten quite upset about our math lessons this week.”

 

“I’m sorry, Miss Susan,” she sniffled, “I’ll try to be better behaved tomorrow.”

 

“No, dear, that’s not what I meant.”  Susan knelt down to the girl’s level.  “Will you tell me what you don’t understand?”  Abby shook her head no.  “Why not?”  Still the girl hesitated.  “Please tell me.”

 

“No, you’ll think I’m stupid.”  She was very stubborn about this.  “I don’t want to be stupid.  People are nice to you if you’re stupid and you’re pretty, but I’m not pretty so I can’t be stupid.”

 

“I see.”  And Susan could see that.  People would always assume that Susan… but this wasn’t about her.  “Come sit with me, Abby.”  She sat down in the front row and patted the seat next to her.  Abby followed obediently.  “Can I see your slate?”

 

“Yes, Miss Susan.  I’m sorry, Miss Susan.”  The girl bashfully handed over the tablet, covered in scrawling letters and numbers on one side, things crossed out many times and rewritten.  There were drawings on the other, presumably once the girl had given up trying to understand the lesson.

 

“We’ll clear all this, and go over what you didn’t understand.  It’s best to start with a blank slate, that way you don’t have any of the old numbers still in your head to confuse you.  Is that alright?”

 

“Yes… but aren’t you mad at me for the drawings?”  Susan thought about this for a moment.  The girl should have been paying better attention, but if she was so upset then perhaps it wasn’t entirely her fault for not understanding.  And anyway, the sketches weren’t half bad.

 

“You should have been listening to me instead of doodling.”  Abby’s bottom lip quivered.  “But no, I’m not mad.  You should keep practicing – who knows, one day you might become a famous artist.  Just practice when I’m not giving a lesson.”

 

“Yes, Miss Susan.”  The girl’s face lit up.  A famous artist?  That sounded awfully exciting.

 

“But as a famous artist you won’t know if you have enough money to buy supplies unless you learn multiplication.”  She cleared the slate of its contents.  “Let’s say you’ve just sold your first painting for $10, and you want to buy some new materials.”  Susan didn’t really know anything about art, but the girl probably wouldn’t notice the difference.

 

“Alright.  Now what?”

 

“You go to the store.  They have paintbrushes and paints of all different colors and sizes.  Let’s say you want to buy 2 paintbrushes, and they cost $3 each.  We need to figure how much you spent, and how much you have leftover.”

 

“Oh…”  Abby and Miss Susan went over the lesson much slower, counting on fingers and drawing out different pairs and combinations on the slate, until Abby finally smiled and said, “I get it!”  She flung her arms around Susan and thanked her, rushing out the door to get home and tell her parents she was going to be an artist because now she knew multiplication.

 

Susan sat back down at her desk and began organizing her things.  This year was supposed to have been a blank slate for her: in a new town, living on her own, away from the people and things that had made everything feel so complicated… but maybe she needed to take a bit of her own advice and erase the clutter from before, so she could truly start afresh.


End file.
